A practicum provided 10th- grade students in 2 English honors classes with direct instruction in sentence combining. The goal of the program was to increase the syntactic complexity of student writing, to have students express more in each sentence. Instruction was approached from different aspects. The students worked with two textbooks on…

This glossary is a component of "Beginning Pashto," a set of materials (including a textbook, student workbook, teacher's manual, and tapescripts) that is designed for teaching and learning the Pashto language. The glossary contains, in dictionary form, the vocabulary and phrases that occur in the 14 units of the 5 components of the series. Each…

To help students achieve a better understanding of narrative prose, yet still keep the benefits of semantic mapping, the traditional form of the semantic map is modified by incorporating the elements of story structure as part of the map. This format is called episodic mapping. Episodic mapping is based on the idea that most well-developed stories…

This 10-chapter monograph explores the range of influences parents have on their children's linguistic development and in the process attempts to understand why parents adopt the language styles they do in addressing children. The discussion focuses on the following three themes that are interwoven throughout the book: (1) the social nature of…

Working on the assumption that story structure contributes to the reading comprehension of students, a study assessed the comprehension and recall of 12 seventh and eighth grade remedial reading students. Subjects read a basal story revised to conform to a familiar story grammar and the original, unrevised, basal story. The two original stories…

Working papers resulting from the 1986 University of North Dakota Summer Institute of Linguistics include: "Orthographic Reform in Kope" (John M. Clifton); "Ternarity and Obligatory Branching in Piraha" (Daniel Everett); "Reduplication in Majang" (Pete Unseth); "Indirect Objects and Incorporation in Mazatec"…

It is argued that the analysis of stress placement in Piraha offers important new evidence on the proper characterization of prosodic organization and the notational devices necessary to express this organization. It is shown that Piraha stress placement is intractable to either a grid account or a binary branching analysis, but that an insightful…

Verb agreement, rules, and their application in Lakota, a Siouan language, are examined in the framework of relational grammar. It is argued that certain relational grammar concepts, especially the notions of level and working 2, provide the necessary theoretical apparatus for formulating concise rules of verb agreement in Lakota. The rules…

Children's visual attention to, and comprehension of, a television program was measured. A total of 64 children, equally distributed by sex, with 32 in kindergarten and 32 in fifth grade, were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions that crossed two levels of content cues with two levels of sound effects. The content cue conditions…

An evaluation of the t-unit as the basic unit of analysis of second language development in written form argues that despite the t-unit's advantages, the sentence-based analysis is superior for examining syntactic complexity in at least three ways: (1) it better characterizes learner knowledge; (2) it facilitates comparison across learners and…

A discussion of problems in teaching business German focuses on methodologies used to introduce syntax and grammar at the introductory and intermediate levels. The formalistic, progressive approaches to grammar and syntax that American students are accustomed to in language instruction put them at a disadvantage because they: (1) make it difficult…

A study comparing the dialects of Ozark and Appalachian English addresses a possible relationship between the two dialects. The study compares selected structures in the two dialects in order to (1) examine similarities and differences, (2) investigate the behavior of a range of ages (10-70+) to determine patterns of change, (3) examine…

Computer-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the key to enabling humans and their computer-based creations to interact with machines using natural languages (English, Japanese, German, etc.) rather than formal computer languages. NLP is a major research area in the fields of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Commercial…

Two 50-item multiple-choice forms of a grammar test were developed differing only in humor being included in 20 items of one form. One hundred twenty-six (126) eighth graders received the test plus alternate forms of a questionnaire. Humor inclusion did not affect grammar scores on matched humorous/nonhumorous items nor on common post-treatment…

A proposal that the English as a second language (ESL) curriculum should initially focus on psycholinguistic reading is discussed. It is claimed that effective reading is difficult to achieve using the present ordering of the ESL curriculum. This is because of the heavy focus on learning active command of grammatical detail during the early,…